Introduction
The Russian Empire 1450– 1801
How to describe an early modern empire over more than three centuries? So many
regions, so many economies, so many ethnicities and so much change over time.
By 1801 the Russian empire stretched from Poland to the Pacific, from the
Arctic to the Caspian and Black Seas, encompassing dozens of subject peoples
with vastly different cultures and histories. The task for Russia’s rulers centered in
Moscow—“grand princes”until 1547,“tsars”until 1721,“emperors”thereafter—
was to expand in search of productive resources (human and material) and to
maintain local stability sufficient to mobilize those resources once conquered. They
faced challenges to their rule of all sorts, ranging from the fundamental problem of
distance (“the enemy of empire,”in Fernand Braudel’s pithy phrase), to violent
uprisings, to constantflight of the taxpaying population, to resistance by elites in
previously sovereign states. But they accomplished their task of imperial expansion,
mobilization and governance nonetheless, rising from a forested outpost on Europe’s
and Eurasia’s fringe in 1450 to a major geopolitical player in both arenas by 1801.
Our goal is to track how Moscow’s rulers accomplished that feat while giving
appropriate attention to the empire’s great diversity—ethnic, religious, social, and
political. We explore not only how the empire rose to power and was governed, but
also who its many subjects were and how, if at all, the realm constituted a social and
political unity.
Finding an organizational framework for such a large project, spanning more
than three centuries and thousands of square miles, is tricky, since one runs the risk
of reifying a constantly changing historical reality or imposing modern categories
on the past. Russian history has certainly seen plenty of that—early modern Russia
since the sixteenth century has been labeled a despotism and its people uncivilized,
primarily in comparison to Europe. Not only normative, this trope is either
teleological, suggesting a European path of development on which Russia is, at
best, lagging, if not entirely left out, or essentialist, suggesting that Russians can
never assimilate western values. Happily, recent scholarship has provided the
foundations for thinking more complexly about early modern Russia as state and
society. Since the 1970s scholars (primarily in America) have been exploring“how
autocracy worked,”overturning images of a literally all-powerful tsar in favor of a
politics where the great men of the realm and their clans upon whom governance
relied were consulted and engaged in decision making; new work has seen implicit
limitation on the autocratic power of the ruler in Russia’s religiously based ideology